Saturday, February 16, 2019

Yesterday
at The Corner,
Ramesh Ponnuru responded to a reader who criticizes opponents of abortion who
express special outrage at late-term abortions.If all direct abortion amounts
to murder, the reader says, then it is only a cynical political tactic to speak
of late-term abortions as if they were especially odious.I more or less agree with Ponnuru’s reply to
this (give it a read, it’s brief), but I would add a clarification and a
qualification.

Thursday, February 14, 2019

Addressing contemporary and
historical objections, Feser explains the logic of each proof with impressive
clarity… Five Proofs is a useful resource for anyone
seeking an introduction to historical arguments about God’s existence and their
relationship to contemporary philosophical scholarship.

Wednesday, February 6, 2019

Our sojourn
among the Old Atheists was briefer than I’d intended.To my great surprise, I see that the previous
installment in this series dates from roughly the middle of 2016!So let’s make a return visit.Our theme has been the tendency of the
best-known Old Atheists to show greater insight vis-à-vis the consequences of
atheism than we find in their shallow New Atheist descendants.This was true of Nietzsche
and of Sartre,
and it is true of Sigmund Freud.So lay
back on the couch and light up a cigar.And before you start speculating about what hidden meaning lay behind my
sudden return to this topic, remember: Sometimes a blog post is just a blog
post.

Saturday, January 26, 2019

I have only
a little to add to what others have already said about the Kafkaesque Covington
affair.There were, as you all know by
now, three main parties involved.There
was the group led by Nathan Phillips, who is now known to be a
liar and rabble
rouser who appears to have been trying
to provoke a confrontation.There were the “Black Hebrew Israelites,” classified by the SPLC as a
hate group and who have been captured on video instigating
the whole mess by shouting things that any left-winger would normally
denounce as the worst sort of racist, sexist, homophobic, and fundamentalist
bigotry.And there are the Covington Catholic
school teenagers, who were there waiting for a bus and got caught in the middle
of these two groups of lunatics.

Friday, January 11, 2019

A naïve
understanding of materialism attributes to it a naïve understanding of
matter. Matter, common sense says, is
more or less the way it appears to us in ordinary experience. It is solid, colored stuff that always
tastes, smells, sounds, and feels a certain way. Materialism, on a naïve understanding, is the
view that everything that exists is like that.
Even unobservable particles are assumed to be tiny solid, colored
objects that have their own tastes, smells, sounds, and feels to them. Like little stones or marbles.

Thursday, December 27, 2018

In two
recent posts, we looked at philosopher Alex Byrne’s criticisms of claims made
by some transgender activists to the effect that
sex is not binary and that
it is socially constructed. Byrne
is by no means the only philosopher alarmed at the increasingly bizarre claims
being made by such activists – and the shrillness with which they are making
them. Kathleen Stock worries that such
ideas will
cause harm to women. Daniel
A. Kaufman warns that they threaten nothing less than the
end of civil rights. Nor are
these philosophers conservatives who are hostile to the sexual revolution. They are progressives concerned about
extremism and anti-intellectualism in their own ranks. And as if to prove the critics’ point, some of
the activists have in response tried to get the
critics fired and otherwise to silence them.

Sunday, December 23, 2018

A Protestant
friend once asked me what the point is of the Catholic doctrine of
transubstantiation. Why is it so
important to think that Christ is really present under the accidents of bread
and wine? What is the cash value of this
idea? The answer I gave him is best
understood in light of the meaning of Christmas.

Christmas is
about Emmanuel, God with us. In
particular, it is about the second Person of the Trinity entering the material
world by taking on flesh. He did so by
entering into Mary’s womb, and that is why Mary had to be without sin, whether
original or actual. She was, in the most
intimate way possible, the tabernacle of God.
And the tabernacle of God must be spotless.

Thursday, December 13, 2018

Recently
we looked at
philosopher Alex Byrne’s defense of the commonsense view that there are only
two sexes.In a new
article at Arc Digital,
Byrne defends another aspect of sexual common sense – the thesis that the
distinction between male and female is natural, and not a mere social construct.Let’s take a look.

As is
typically done these days by writers on this topic, Byrne begins by
distinguishing between sex and gender.Sex has to do with the biological distinction between male and female,
whereas gender has to do with the way the difference between male and female is
shaped by culture.In the article in
question, Byrne does not challenge the claim that gender is socially
constructed.He is concerned only to
rebut the more radical claim that sex is socially constructed.We’ll return to the gender question later,
though, because the claim that sex differences are natural is relevant to it.

Actuality
and potentiality, substantial form and prime matter, efficient causality and
teleology are among the fundamental concepts of Aristotelian philosophy of
nature. Aristotle’s Revenge argues that these concepts are not only
compatible with modern science, but are implicitly presupposed by modern
science. Among the many topics covered
are the metaphysical presuppositions of scientific method; the status of
scientific realism; the metaphysics of space and time; the metaphysics of
quantum mechanics; reductionism in chemistry and biology; the metaphysics of
evolution; and neuroscientific reductionism. The book interacts heavily with the literature
on these issues in contemporary analytic metaphysics and philosophy of science,
so as to bring contemporary philosophy and science into dialogue with the
Aristotelian tradition.

Monday, November 26, 2018

It’s the latest
open thread. This is the time to get
your off-topic comments off your chest, and to give your threadjacking impulses
free rein. From iPhones to I, Claudius, from D-list celebs to
Eugene Debs, from the A-theory to Blossom Dearie – discuss whatever you like, within
reason. Just keep it civil, classy, and
troll-free.

I should
perhaps clarify for some readers that these open threads are not “Ask Ed
anything” posts. Sorry, I just don’t have
time to respond to most questions. Think
of them instead as “Ask each other anything” posts.

Byrne argues
that it is a mistake to suppose that one’s sex is fundamentally a matter of what chromosomes one has or even what
sorts of genitals one has.Hence it is also
a mistake to point to examples such as individuals who have male chromosomes
but female external genitalia, or people who have only an X chromosome or XXY
chromosomes, as evidence against the thesis that sex is binary.In fact, Byrne suggests, chromosomes and
genitalia are reflections of a deeper distinction, and the nature of that
distinction is not captured by a mere description of the chromosomes and
genitalia:

Thursday, November 8, 2018

At the National Catholic Register, Edward
Pentin recently interviewed philosopher Thomas Pink on the subject of the
failure of the Church’s leaders to teach and defend her doctrines. (The interview is in two parts, here
and here.) Pink is interesting and insightful as always,
and in general I agree with the substance of his analysis. However, it seems to me that the way he
expresses his main point is potentially misleading and could needlessly open him
up to unfair criticism.

Saturday, October 27, 2018

Bernard
Wuellner’s always-useful Dictionary
of Scholastic Philosophy defines violence as “action contrary to the nature of a thing.” Readers of Aristotle and Aquinas will be
familiar with this usage, which is reflected in their distinction between
natural and violent motion. Some of their
applications of this distinction
presuppose obsolete science. For
example, we now know that physical objects do not have motion toward the center
of the earth, specifically, as their natural end. Hence projectile motion away from the earth
is not, after all, violent. But the
distinction itself is not obsolete. For
example, trapping or killing an animal is obviously violent in the relevant
sense. It is acting contrary to the
natural ends of the animal.

Friday, October 12, 2018

A voluntarist conception of persons takes
the will to be primary and the intellect to be secondary.That is to say, for voluntarism, at the end
of the day what we think reflects what we will.An intellectualist conception of
persons takes the intellect to be primary and the will to be secondary.For intellectualism, at the end of the day,
what we will reflects what we think.The
two views are, naturally, more complicated than that.For example, no voluntarist would deny that
what we think affects what we will,
and no intellectualist would deny that what we will affects what we think.But
the basic idea is that for the voluntarist, the will is ultimately in the
driver’s seat, whereas for the intellectualist, the intellect is ultimately in
the driver’s seat.

Monday, September 24, 2018

While there
are still a few days left to September, I should note that this month marks the
10th anniversary of this blog.It was initially started in part to serve as a kind of online supplement
to The
Last Superstition, which was published around the same time.Of the eleven books I’ve written, co-written,
or edited, seven of them (including TLS)
have appeared during the last ten years.We’ll see if I can keep up the pace during the next ten years.

Wednesday, September 5, 2018

There are
five considerations that seem to me to make it very likely that Archbishop Viganò’s testimony is truthful.To be sure, given how numerous and detailed
are the claims he makes, it would not be surprising if he has gotten certain particulars
wrong.And perhaps in his passion he has
inadvertently overstated things here and there.But the main claims are probably true.I certainly do not believe he is lying.The reasons are these:

Friday, August 31, 2018

Prof. John
Finnis is the most eminent living “new natural law” theorist, and a longtime
opponent of capital punishment.Indeed,
like other NNL writers, he regards capital punishment as always and inherently wrong, and believes that the Church could
adopt this novel teaching.You might
think, then, that he would approve of Pope Francis’s recent revision to the
catechism.Not so.

Tuesday, August 28, 2018

The pattern
is by now familiar. Serious criticisms
are leveled by serious people against the pope; the pope ignores them; and his
associates and defenders disregard the substance of the criticisms while
flinging ad hominem attacks at the
critics. This happened during the doctrinal
controversies over Amoris Laetitia
and capital punishment, and it is happening again in the wake of Archbishop
Vigano’s astonishing testimony. The
pope refuses to answer the charges against him.
The Usual Sycophants try to smear the archbishop and his defenders as disgruntled
reactionaries. Among Uncle Ted’s boys,
Cardinal Cupich leapt almost immediately for the bottom
of the rhetorical barrel: “Quite frankly, they also don’t like [the pope]
because he’s a Latino.”

Wednesday, August 15, 2018

An
international group of 45 Catholic scholars and clergy has signed an appeal to
the cardinals of the Catholic Church, calling on them to advise Pope Francis to
retract the recent revision made to the Catechism, on the grounds that its
appearance of contradicting scripture and traditional teaching is causing
scandal.The appeal and list of
signatories has
been published today as an open letter at First Things.

As LifeSiteNews is reporting, over 30
further Catholic scholars, clergy, and professionals have also added their
signatures to the appeal.This longer
list can
be viewed there.

About Me

I am a writer and philosopher living in Los Angeles. I teach philosophy at Pasadena City College. My primary academic research interests are in the philosophy of mind, moral and political philosophy, and philosophy of religion. I also write on politics, from a conservative point of view; and on religion, from a traditional Roman Catholic perspective.